Health & Wellness

You are a target in a war. So are your children, grandchildren, parents, and the people half way around the world whom you have never met. The war is for resources and you are in the way.

You Are In the Way. It's that simple.

Comment: All of this REALLY makes you wonder why, if they are trying to kill people off - and it is clear they are - are they so anti-smoking? Is there some health benefit that smoking confers that we don't know about?

Since most of us are going to be in the workplace from age 23 to 65, we're guaranteed to run into one. Or two. In some industries, you might bounce from a bad boss to a worse one and back again.

You need deft armor and an exit strategy to protect yourself. Now.

You also need some boss-dar so you can distinguish between the merely lame (taking you to lunch - at Wendy's) from the distracted (no annual review for years); or the thoughtless (forgetting to give you credit) from the malicious (claiming your best idea was his or her own).

You starve yourself, shedding pounds, and it feels too good to ever stop.

Or you eat lots -- as much as you want, more than you want -- and then sneak away from your loved ones to purge it all.

But you're not 16, not 19, not 21. Not a young woman at all. You're in your 30s, 40s, or 50s. And you can't stop.

Anorexia and bulimia used to be considered health problems that afflicted teenage girls. But doctors are finding that a growing number of older women are now being diagnosed with some sort of eating disorder.

"It can happen to anybody at any stage of their life," said Dr. Alexander Sackeyfio, a psychiatrist and eating-disorder specialist at the Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich. "I think we're becoming more aware of it and are better at diagnosing it."

Most Americans are still not eating the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, a new government report shows.

Even though many people know that fruits and vegetables help lower the risk of many diseases, consumption is still a long way from reaching the government goals set inHealthy People 2010, the researchers said. Their bad news is delivered in this week's issue ofMorbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Only 32.6 percent of adults are eating fruit two or more times per day, and only 27.2 percent are eating vegetables three or more times a day," said researcher Dr. Larry Cohen, an epidemic intelligence officer at the CDC.

That falls far short of the national goal of getting 75 percent of the population to eat fruit two or more times a day and 50 percent to eat vegetables three or more times per day by 2010, Cohen said.

The irony is that most Americans are aware of the benefits of eating fruits and vegetables, Cohen said. "However, translating that awareness to actually doing it is lacking."

"Green" means "go," but what does "red" mean? Just about everybody says "stop" since we all have learned to imbue certain colors with meaning (or we would be road kill by now). Long thought to be limited to higher levels of information processing, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies successfully traced this type of associative learning to early stages of the visual processing pathway.

"Sensory neurons in the visual cortex that handle incoming information are very plastic and what they 'see' is determined by our experience in the world," says lead investigator Thomas D. Albright, director of the Vision Center Laboratory. Their findings, reported in the March 14 issue of the journal Neuron, will help scientists to better understand how such learning takes place in the brain based on our daily experiences.

Human memory relies mostly on association and objects frequently seen together to become linked in our mind; when we try to retrieve information, one thing reminds us of another, which reminds us of yet another, and so on. Not surprisingly, neurobiologists have been trying to uncover the underlying mechanisms for decades.

In a section of his book 'Dissecting Antismoker Brains' Michael J McFadden deals with the different type of antismokers' and their various personality traits and behaviours.

Below is a condensed summary of the nine types of anti-smokers identified in Michael McFadden's book, "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains. While the description of antismokers is only a small part of his book overall, it lays an important groundwork for understanding them and learning how to fight against them.

A good laugh may not only lift your mood, but can make you more cooperative and altruistic towards strangers, according to a new study.

Laughter, a universal human behavior, has been shown in previous studies to act as a "social lubricant" and promote group cohesiveness. In this new study, researchers tested whether this sense of closeness would promote altruistic behavior.

Study participants watched either a funny or a serious video, and then played a game with strangers to see how laugher affected the balance between group interest and self-interest during the game-play.

Each person was given a small sum of money (about $5) and told they could invest it in either a private fund or a group fund - they would get back whatever they put in the private fund, while whatever was contributed to the group fund would be doubled and split evenly among group members, regardless of how much each person put in.

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.